I think unmanned systems will augment, rather than replace manned airplanes. In one way of thinking, we've been using drones for decades...a tomahawk missile is an unmanned vehicle with a warhead.
Compared to a modern fighter jet, drone aircraft are cheap, dumb, and disposable. Satellite control involves many seconds of latency and sometimes communication is lost entirely, especially in bad weather. It is routine and expected for a drone to just lose contact / fail / crash and be written off. You can get away with that since there's no loss of life, but you probably wouldn't want to use a drone to carry a nuclear bomb, for example. You can always just assassinate the Taliban leader tomorrow, but an unidentified or hostile aircraft violating your airspace needs to be dealt with right now.
There is research on planes that could be sent off with orders and not require continuous communication, avoiding some of these issues, but to my knowledge they aren't in widespread "production" use.
An F-18, on the other hand, is an engineering marvel and extremely responsive, agile, and flexible. Pilots can react very quickly to situations and have a realistic chance of winning dogfights with other fighter jets, for example, which drones almost certainly couldn't do.
On the other hand, if all you need to do is assassinate some people in a country without an air force, a drone will do just fine.
But in a dogfight a drone would have one big advantage: ability to withstand much higher G-forces. For now manned fighter pilots have the edge, but I would be surprised if that's still true in 20 years.
There was a fair bit of dogfighting in the Gulf War, but as with many things in the military, it matters more that you could then that you actually do.
Drones are great in permissive environments, but not ready for prime time. Plus they have an astronomical mishap (crash) rate. In Manned airplanes, the pilot can troubleshoot. Also, air to air combat (dogfighting) and aerial tanking can't be done by drones...yet!
And terrifying...night carrier landings behind the carrier are pure insanity. After Every single one at least one of my legs was shaking uncontrollably!
You really need to mention that you're a navy carrier pilot. In the world of pilots, navy carrier pilots are the heroes.
My hat's off to you, I have the qualifications but have always hesitated to apply to my nation's pilot programme. The sacrifices military personnel make are really extraordinary when viewed from a civilian point of view.
I also work outside IT field (I'm an architect). Before everything I see HN as a place where you have the smartest online community in the world (I think I am not exaggerating) with a very low amount of noise (with some complains from highly tech oriented and nostalgic users forgetting that non-tech people most of times enrich the community), sometimes even with stories/comments/news told in first person (like here) making the knowledge frontiers available to anyone curious enough to dig it.
As far as I am concerned, there can never be too many online memoirs about carrier night landings. Please write up your stories for us chairbound types!
"... They are all of the same general shape and internal composition, and when looking down upon them, I couldn’t help but think of flying over suburbs of the US ..."
"... When I emerged from the near empty Officer’s Mess after our Thanksgiving meal, I wandered up to the hanger bay and was shocked by what I saw. Enlisted sailors, many of whom had spent hours painting the walls, and cleaning the floors to present an image of perfection to our superior, were standing in an endless line hundreds deep waiting to get their meal. A meal that was due to close minutes later. I had never seen a line so long on the ship before. Somewhere the logistics chain failed, and priorities were askew. I did what I could for a few of them, but many still missed out on their meal. As a leader of these men and women, I felt ashamed. As far as I know, General Petraeus didn’t get wind of this – had he, I wonder how it would have turned out. ...."
I'm surprised by this. Non provisioning of the enlisted on a major US celebration. Could be mistaken as a sign of shite leadership. Your descriptions of Petraeus on the other hand speaks the opposite.
"... Our suspicions were unfounded. Later on the transit home, in the hour of nothing but straight and level fight, we discussed this within our two man crew. The running could have been kids playing as they are wont to do around campfires everywhere. How do you balance the benign with the threatening? ..."
Best place to get news about the trends shaping our world, and muse over natl security implications.